Wanderoo v. Relic

The old political art of invective and abuse still flowers in Tennessee. So does Memphis' Boss Ed Crump, 69.

Last week, Boss Ed was up to his eyebrows in a shouting contest with the Crump-hating Nashville Tennessean. He was annoyed beyond his limited endurance by the Tennessean's insistent labeling of Memphis as "Crumptown," and even more annoyed by its fight against the poll tax, which helps to keep bosses in power. Snapped Boss Ed: "This trio of mangy bubonic rats are conscienceless liars . . . cowards at heart, yellow to the core. . . . There is not one of them who, either singly or all together, would meet us on the street . . . and say the things to our faces that they have said in their scurrilous newspaper, behind our backs. The honeymoon of this lying, corroding crowd of murderers of character is over. Their swill barrel is empty."

Then Boss Ed waded into three principal Tennesseans:

Publisher Silliman Evans has "a foul mind and a wicked heart. . . . Ventosity is his chief stock and trade."

Columnist Joe Hatcher "has a low, filthy, diseased mind--lies by nature. . . . He is full of ululation."

Editorialist Jennings Perry "is a sorry, unworthy, despicable character--a venal and licentious scribbler" whose "hifaluting way" of writing about Greek culture does not show "enough knowledge of Greek to qualify him to open a restaurant. . . . Just as one would expect of a wanderoo. He has the brains of a quagga." **

Sniffs & Snarls. Boss Crump is adept at pitching epithets without catching libel suits. He had his 1,700 words of vituperation--in which the word "rat" appeared 14 times, "liar" 20 times--read aloud in both houses of the Tennessee Legislature, a cleansing process by which slander becomes legally privileged. Then he sent the whole caboodle to the Tennessean by messenger.

The Tennessean calmly printed the entire tirade--adding that it had not corrected "errors of grammar or syntax." The Tennessean also published pictures of two animals and one human being, correctly identifying them: "This is Ed Crump. . . . This is a Quagga. . . . This is a Wanderoo."

In an editorial, the Tennessean's Jennings Perry rated Boss Crump low as an invective hurler. Said the Tennessean: the South once "bred original and talented artificers in insult. ... Its present practitioners are no more than mere name callers, repetitiously stumbling through the same comminations . . . mumbling a string of bawdy epithets." Trying its own hand, the Tennessean did a little better, but not much. Crump, wrote Editorialist Perry, is a "foulmouthed old boss . . . ugly and snarling ... a contemptible relic of the barbarous past. . . ."

Perry confessed that he had to go to the dictionary to find out what wanderoos and quaggas are. While he was at it, he also looked up the word "crump." In 1783. he reported, it was an Old English adjective meaning "crooked."

*A purple-faced, yellow-whiskered, longtailed monkey. **A South African wild ass.

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